Stephen King once called books like these dull, thudding tracts. He was referring to fiction at the time, but the label obtains here. If this was intended to be an interesting, accessible read, it failed. It is leaden with prose tortured even by the standards of academia, and often so muddled that I found myself having to read passages multiple times to grasp their meaning. Education and erudition are good things, but pretension is not.

Additionally, I found Goldhagen's sniffy disdain for the "lesser" suffering of the Nazis' other victims startlingly dismissive. Clearly, more Jews died than any other group in the Nazis' crosshairs, and it can even be argued that they took the most glee from the extermination of Jews, but to handwave the suffering and death of non-Jewish prisoners to further magnify the horror of the Jewish Holocaust is crass and appalling. If you have to prop up your pet theory by minimizing the atrocities inflicted on those not within your chosen field of exegesis, then your theory holds scant value.

Speaking of scant, the evidence for Goldhagen's premise boils down to, "Those other contributing factors are inconvenient to my pet theory, so lalala." Pass, pass, pass.

The title of the book fairly adequately describes the contents. It is not about Hitler, not primarily about the Nazis or their victims, and not about the French or the Poles or the Soviets. It is about ordinary Germans, and their level of involvement in genocide.

We are introduced to antisemitism that existed in Germany in the 19th century, and learn how it changed over time. We see how Germans, old enough to have been educated before the rise of the Nazis, acted on their antisemitism. This is not an exhaustive book: we get glimpses primarily into the Police Battalions that executed Jews by the thousand in Poland, we get a sense of what Nazis intended with Jewish "work" (e.g. not so much actual productive work, but death), and we see how, in the final days of the Nazi regime, that these ordinary Germans continued to kill Jews by aimlessly marching them around (e.g. not really aimless - the aim was death.)

The author admits in the appendix that "Narrative and description, important as they are for specifying the perpetrators' actions and the settings for their actions properly, are here subordinate to the explanatory goals." Read that to be: the text here is fairly clinical, dense, and sometimes difficult. I've read many books about the Holocaust and the Soviet camps and I often characterize them as "difficult" reads: the subject is grisly. This one is difficult but not because it is grisly.

I generally avoid reading reviews here before I write mine. I don't know why I read some reviews of this book, but having done so I have to digress a bit.

It is commonly said that the victors write the history. I think this is incorrect. The survivors write the history. In the USA today, more than 4 in 10 people somehow think that the Civil War wasn't fought over slavery. This is history written by the losing side. It is how we get people who think of themselves as patriots but who fly the flag of traitors who took up arms against their own country. It's how we get statues to "war heroes" such as Robert E. Lee.

The history of Nazi Germany has been similarly rewritten by the survivors. I've read a couple of dozen memoirs written by German officers. All of them have said that they never participated in atrocities. They all said they never even saw any atrocities. When the Nazis capitulated, it became very difficult to find anybody who admitted to being a Nazi party member. Many who admitted Nazi party membership say they did it to further their careers or their businesses - they weren't "true" Nazis - they only "went along". Heck, we even had a Pope who was a Hitler Youth. You can't make this stuff up.

The common belief was that it wasn't the German people or the German nation that committed the Holocaust, but the Nazis. People claim that ordinary Germans didn't support the genocide and in fact claim that ordinary Germans didn't even know it was happening. This is balderdash. It is the words of those who are denying their own culpability.

Hitler gave speeches as early as 1920 detailing his plans for the elimination of the Jewish people. He wrote a book with that as one of his main theses, and the book sold enough to make him a very wealthy man. Before the war even started, he said that if war broke out (actually, if "the Jews" start a war) that the end would include the annihilation of the Jews. Some make the claim that Hitler wasn't a popular leader, but this is a lie as well. Just look at the old newsreels: see the ecstasy in the peoples' faces. It's like Beatlemania.

To say that most Germans didn't support (or know about) the Holocaust takes some mental gymnastics. Even before the Nuremberg (Jewish) laws were enacted, many professional organizations implemented measures to prohibit Jewish membership. Kristallnacht was not the event of a single city or town, it was universal across Germany. It was so popular that in Nuremberg the next night, 100,000 people turned out to celebrate the event.

The Nazis created over 10,000 camps, more than 600 in Berlin alone. To say that ordinary Germans didn't know about them is to think that they were blind.

Ordinary Germans gladly participated in the removal of Jews from their cities and towns. They happily divided up the possessions of their neighbors and were glad to see them gone. To think they didn't know what was happening to them defies credulity.

Antisemitism was rampant in Europe when Hitler took power. Antisemitism wasn't a creation of the Nazis. Even the Swiss enacted laws very similar to the Nuremberg laws. The Nazis were a catalyst: their presence enabled the genocide. The Holocaust never could have taken place without the victories of the German military. It also couldn't have taken place without the willing (and often enthusiastic) participation of ordinary Germans. Even the German opponents of the Nazis weren't opposed to the elimination of the Jews.

This is not to say that I think there was anything special about Germany between 1933 and 1945. People are people. I don't think we as a species have advanced in the 15 years between the end of WWII and my birth. What happened in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s could happen anywhere else, at any time. Not specifically the Holocaust, but genocide, or the subjugation of innocents. We've seen it in Cambodia and Rwanda and even again in Europe, albeit on a smaller scale.

What happened in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s was that just about everybody held a belief: that Jews were demons intent on destroying the German nation and the German people. One who genuinely holds that belief can only be expected to take action: save their nation and their people by eliminating the enemy. The logic is simple and inescapable. The problem isn't that the Germans were bad people, but that they believed complete nonsense.

People continue to believe complete nonsense today. Such beliefs are eroding our Democracy right now. It seems that millions of people believe that a cabal of Satanic, cannibalistic pedophiles (i.e. Democrats) operate a global child sex trafficking ring that conspired against the former U.S. President Donald Trump during his term in office. People believe that the 2020 election was stolen because German servers storing U.S. voting information were hacked using election software created in Venezuela at the direction of Hugo Chavez (who died 7 years before the election. That's foresight!). People believe all sorts of hallucinatory things, and if they believe them strongly enough, are willing to do anything up to and including genocide.

My rating is a split verdict: the author has an interesting yet poorly written argument; neither element should be decisive in convincing potential readers to take up the book or ignore it. Goldhagen steps into a niche not normally espoused.

It’s a shame such a provocative theme got taken up by so limited a talent. The text is really just 483 pages, including three appendices, plus 130 pages of often important notes that readers will want to consult. Most of these notes should have been folded into the text, but okay. I used two bookmarks.

Both the author and his editor ought to be detained by the first English professor who catches them and given a stern lecture. The basic fault in the text is the failure to render an academic thesis in accessible prose. The less annoying fault is that such a loaded subject needs understatement, yet the author resorts to exclamation points and italics.

Now to the subject. Nobody wants to hold today’s Germans collectively guilty of a crime and in turn victimize them, so discussing the role of Germans in the Holocaust has been tricky. Standard accounts explain the annihilation with little reference to the perpetrators. I often wondered why Jews were never put to work at a time when Germany had a labor shortage of several million and the outcome of the war hung in the balance. Something didn’t add up.

This is the niche Goldhagen steps into. The author’s claim is that the Holocaust was common knowledge to Germans, wildly popular and based on a hatred radically unlike that found in all other times and places. He argues with a persuasive methodology. He looks at three things: police batallions, work camps, and the death marches in the Spring of 1945. Why he chooses these comes clear in the reading. The study of these aspects of the extermination supports his thesis.

Many people reject this idea. The event is so horrific that people now simply can’t bring themselves to think it could have enjoyed widespread support. But Goldhagen can be wrong only if his methodology is mistaken. So we might ask what his methods really prove about the actual source of anti-Semitism. What about the socialists? Socialism in Germany did not imply any sense of brotherhood with Jews, the author claims. Their nationalist turn at the start of World War I seems to bear him out.

Communists, who did disavow anti-Semitism, garnered about a sixth of 1932 vote. But although Goldhagen may be mistaken in hinting that up to 95% of Germans were anti-Semitic, a figure closer to 85% scarcely disposes of the problem. Nor does a 1946 survey of German attitudes, in which up to 80% of Germans espoused anti-Semitic beliefs, even after seeing the consequences. How is that?

We forget the grip that race theory had on the West in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the impetus given it by an early misreading of Darwin. The milieu was made worse by the volkisch substratum of German culture in the century before Hitler. The historian George Mosse describes the transmogrification of race by the German writer Wilhelm Riehl:

n  Above all there was the Jew, who by his very nature was restless. Although the Jew belonged to a Volk, it occupied no specific territory and was consequently doomed to rootlessness. These elements of the population dominated the large cities, which they had erected, according to Riehl, in their own image to represent their particular landscape. However, this was an artificial domain, and in contrast to serene rootedness, everything it contained, including the inhabitants, was in continuous motion. The big city and the proletariat seemed to fuse into an ominous colossus which was endangering the realm of the Volk … n

This came decades before Nazism. The author argues that this view became received wisdom throughout German society. The sheer ferocity of the extermination stemmed from a terror of Jews, seen as an evil, diabolically clever race. But even this was not enough to bring on the Holocaust, which, Goldhagen tells us, required that two other rather unlikely events transpire as well. His argument for this confluence of three factors is his unique contribution to Holocaust studies.

The book’s characterization of Germans matches Anthony Beevor’s historical account, The Fall of Berlin 1945. The defeated Germans, Beevor notes, complained that Allied tactics had brought communism deep into Europe and America’s entry into the war was gratuitous. Beevor cites these among several examples of what he calls “the fatal tendency to confuse cause and effect” by which Germans reasoned. The same pattern comes across in Hitler’s Willing Executioners.

To pin responsibility on the German people as individuals has a sexy cachet in today's culture of total self-responsibility. The confluence of factors by which the author explains the Holocaust, however, does not involve the personal attitudes of Germans and actually throws into doubt the relevance of his methodology in establishing cause.

What the author ignores is the social aspect of the Holocaust, its status as the product of a particular socioeconomic structure. Goldhagen's quest to tag individuals for their actions deflects attention from the context in which fascism arose and neglects the fact that it came to power only over the dead bodies of thousands of Germans. The author takes dishonest advantage of the fact that the aforementioned communists, the main obstacle to anti-Semitism, were exterminated in the process that led to the Holocaust. No, dead men tell no tales; nor does Goldhagen speak for them.

The author notes Germany’s formal disavowal of anti-Semitism. Compare Germany’s accounting of its crimes with Japan’s and one is impressed by how hard it is for any nation to admit to such a wrong. Better yet, compare it to the United States, which, 100 years after slavery, still nurtured dreams of ridding itself of blacks. Even Northern abolitionists before the Civil War were almost universally racist. The inferiority of blacks was taken as fact, a kind of volkisch Americana. All these ideas have their source in social systems that foster the notion that people are manifestly unequal -- and should be treated so.

The effort of Germans to redeem the past sets an example for people in all countries. We might even consider this the bookend to the Holocaust insofar as it, too, has been a particularly German project. People and cultures do change, and modern Germany, at least until recently, has shown us those conditions can change for the better. But the return of militarism in Germany and, with it, historical falsification by the likes of Jorg Barberowski at Humboldt University, throws attention once again not on individuals, but on the nature and function of German capitalism.

.

Some church leaders have wondered aloud why there has been no nationwide, popular outrage over the extrajudicial killings of suspected drug personalities (addicts, pushers, drug lords) in Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte's so-called "War on Drugs.". I think the template for this curious phenomenon had already once existed in the past. It is not at all new.


First, is the identification of these drug personalities as an evil, powerful enemy of the State. Something that threatens the very survival of the nation. President Duterte had estimated the drug addicts’ numbers to be around three to four million which he claimed would surely multiply rapidly to millions more unless stopped. He said he is the country’s last chance to prevent this certain catastrophe as he spoke of the very near possibility of the Philippines turning into a narco-state, controlled by narco-politicians. It is a very grim picture indeed.

Second, is the DEHUMANIZATION of this enemy. One time he had asked, in a serious tone, if these addicts are “still human.” He also said once that a person who had been an addict for two years had no more functioning brain to speak of and is already completely “hopeless.” He warns addicts not to leave their houses anymore, though there had been several instances of these extrajudicial killings done inside the houses of the victims, some of them shot to death while sleeping.


That these drug personalities are perceived to be no longer human, or had become SUB-HUMANS, is wittingly or unwittingly suggested in the language of those who had expressed approval of these killings, some of them directly (“kill them all!”) and some indirectly (“let’s support this war on drugs!”). Netizens who applaud President Duterte’s method, for example, label these drug personalities as “mga patapon” (useless, good-for-nothing), animals, criminals and the scourge of society. One time, in the context of the then coming Miss Universe contest in the Philippines, Senator Sotto said that DESPITE the daily killings, the Philippines is a safe country. One would wonder how a country afflicted with DAILY unsolved murders by the dozens could possibly be “safe,” but if one would consider that the victims are sub-human entities with no rights, then the statement of the senator makes perfect sense. The society is indeed safe, safe for people, because those falling victims to this violence are more just like stray dogs being put to permanent sleep.


President Duterte had warned several times: “If you destroy my country, I will kill you.” The people had long shared this world-view of drug personalities destroying the country and of them already beyond the clutches of normality that they had become less of a human being than the upright citizens of this country. This, even before President Duterte stood in the limelight of national politics.


This is the mindset that has gripped the nation and it is eerily similar to the anti-semitism so very popular and strong in Germany in the 1930’s which catapulted Adolf Hitler into power precisely under that platform. The drug personalities in the Philippines today were the Jews in Germany and Europe during Hitler’s time. International Jewry was then likewise perceived to be a powerful force which had brought, and will continue to bring, untold misery to the German nation and will usher its complete destruction unless eliminated. Similarly, this prevalent anti-semitism was also based on the widely-held conviction that the Jews are sub-humans who can, or OUGHT to, be removed from the face of the earth. Anti-semitism was very strong in Germany, but was not confined there. The American General George S. Patton, for example, even in the aftermath of the Holocaust, had expressed the view that Jews are “lower than animals…a sub-human species without any of the cultural or social refinements of our time.”


Some friends of mine had opined that the comparison is way off because, they reasoned out, the Jews were “innocent” while the drug personalities we have now (including the addicts) are “guilty.” But I merely point out to them: during those times, the Jews were looked down upon as scoundrels, criminals and as guilty as hell, possibly in much worse way Filipinos consider the drug personalities as heinous criminals now.


Some church leaders are speaking out now against these extrajudicial killings but you don’t see any of the great churches here in the Philippines using their economic, moral and political clout to the fullest to stop these killings, possibly stymied by President Duterte’s continued popularity. Not even all the Philippine churches are speaking out. This was similar to what had happened in Germany during the Nazi era:


“The German churches provide a crucial case in the study of the breadth, character, and power of modern German eliminationist antisemitism, because their leadership and membership could have been expected, for variety of reasons, to have been among the people in Germany most resistant to it. The churches retained a large measure of their institutional independence, they contained many people who regarding other matters harbored non-Nazi and anti-Nazi sympathies, and their governing doctrines and humanistic traditions clashed glaringly with central precepts of the eliminationist project. The abundant evidence about their leadership’s and membership’s conceptions of Jews and stances towards the eliminationist persecution merely confirms and, because it is a crucial case, further strengthens greatly the conclusion that among the German people, the Nazified conception of Jews and support for the eliminationist project was extremely widespread, a virtual axiom.


“Not only the churches and their leadership but also…virtually the entire German elite—intellectual, professional, religious, political, and military—embraced eliminationist antisemitism wholeheartedly as its own. The German elite and ordinary Germans alike failed to express dissent from the Nazi conception of Jewry in 1933, 1938, 1941, and 1944, although the nature and statue of the Jews was one of the most relentlessly discussed subjects in the German public sphere. No evidence suggests that any but an insignificant scattering of Germans harbored opposition to the eliminationist program, save for its most brutally wanton aspects. Even violent anti-Nazi diatribes typically did not dwell on the eliminationist anti-semitism or measures as reasons for hating and opposing the Nazis. Germans not only failed to indicate that they believed the (by non-Nazi standards) criminal treatment of the Jews to be unjust. They not only failed to end help to their beleaguered countrymen, let alone foreign Jews. But even worse for the Jews, so many Germans also willingly aided the eliminationist enterprise. They did so by taking initiative to further it, by attacking Jews verbally and physically, or by hastening the process of excluding and isolating them from German society and thereby accelerating the process of turning Jews into socially dead beings and German Jewry into a leprous community.”(“Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust” by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen)


Another common thing between Germany then and the Philippines now is the concept of collective guilt. Sure, some drug personalities before had committed rape, murder and other barbaric crimes which, to the outraged citizens, truly deserved the harshest punishment. But those being extrajudicially killed now are obviously not those who did these crimes of long ago, some of them having been already meted out the punishment they deserved. The drug personalities being targeted now for execution, sans trial, are deemed deserving of their fate not because of personal guilt but merely guilt by association. This was similar to the Holocaust where people were killed regardless of nationality, religion, political belief or personal history but simply because of their Jewish blood. That was why even babies and young Jewish children were shot or gassed in the Nazi crematoria.


Hitler was likewise a much beloved leader, who took power via a democratic election and was considered as Father (Tatay) to the German nation. To the Germans, he was a saviour, almost god-like, that they could lovingly write about him like this:


“…For years we have been following with the greatest inner sympathy and approval the uplifting work of Adolf Hitler, this German man who, filled with ardent love for his fatherland, is sacrificing his life for his idea of a purified, united, national greater Germany, who has set himself the hazardous task of opening the eyes of the working class to the enemy within and to Marxism and its consequences, who as no other has managed to bring people together in brotherly reconciliation, has been able to do away with the almost insuperable class hatred, who has restored to thousands upon thousands of despairing people the joyous hope of a reviving, dignified fatherland and a firm belief in it. His personality has made on us too, as anyone who comes into contact with him, a deep, moving impression, and we have understood how such s simple, physically delicate man is capable of exercising such power. This power is founded on the moral strength and purity of this man, who without ceasing stands up for an idea he has seen to be right, which he is trying with the fervour and humility of divine vocation to realise. Such a man, who is standing up so directly for good, must inspire, electrify people, animate them with selfless love and devotion for his person. I freely admit that we too are under the spell of this personality, that we too, who stood by him in happy days, will remain faithful to him now too in his hour of need.” (“Twilight of the Wagners: the Unveiling of a Family’s Legacy” by Gottfried Wagner).


What we see now, for me, is but History repeating itself. Unfortunately it has decide to resurrect here, in our clueless nation which is seemingly condemned to suffer the unlearned lessons of the past.

A must-read book on the subject of responsibility of the ordinary German. Controversially debated in Germany because Goldhagen's position from which he argues is very modern, but at the same time very revealing behind which "protective lies" that Generation hid behind and other peoples accepted in the backdrop of the Cold War.

Unreliable sources and much speculation in this obviously vengeful and hateful book. This author simply hates all Germans and claims they were all just like Hitler. Avoid this book, in my opinion.

Daniel Goldhagen was born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts.  His father was a retired Harvard professor and he attended Harvard as an undergraduate, graduate student, then worked there as an assistant professor. This book is an extension of his graduate thesis. Because of the credentials that Harvard shined on him, his book was given an incredible promotional campaign by his publisher. 

Goldhagen believes the holocaust happened because the vast majority of ordinary Germans possessed a unique and virulent type of "eliminationist antisemitism" which was a part of their identity developed over the centuries.

Goldhagen's book is well documented. He proves that the Catholic, Protestant, and Lutheran churches had been marinating in a thick bath of antisemitism for centuries. He believes Hitler took that antisemitism and created a powerful racist, scapegoat ideology. This ideology was pounded into people's heads through relentless propaganda in schools, universities, professional offices, factories, government, news media, film, radio, theater, speeches, posters, and laws which ultimately gave rise to an entire nation willing to murder Jews.

This book's greatest flaw is the claim that this most extreme form of antisemitism was unique only to Germany and Germany alone. This theory has been debunked. There are countless witnesses accounts of those who have given testimony of willing executioners all over Europe before and after WWII, in Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, Latvia, Estonia, Croatia, etc.

Not a bad book by any means, but it gives me the impression he has something of a feud going on with Christopher Browning.

Quite why I don't know, but perhaps because Browning might be the better historian?

Gave up the same day I said I'd read it again. It's just not worth it. Read the first 20 pages or so and one's good. Very tedious writing.

t“Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust” by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen is a richly detailed and provocative history of the Holocaust. The book strives to explain why this genocide happened where and when it did. I remember that the book was controversial when it came out in 1996, and when I finally read it, I can see why.
tGoldhagen’s book tries to rebut popular misconceptions about the mass extermination of Jews in Nazi-held territory: that the killing of Jews was done only by SS officers and Nazi Party members, that most Germans of the time knew nothing about the concentration camps, that perpetrators of the murders were only following orders and would have been killed if they disobeyed, and that only a small minority of Germans in the early 20th century were antisemitic.
t“Hundreds of thousands of German contributed to the genocide and the still larger system of subjugation that was the vast concentration camp system,” Goldhagen writes. “Despite the regime’s half-hearted attempts to keep the genocide beyond the view of most Germans, millions knew of the mass slaughter.”
tGoldhagen convincingly points out that antisemitism had a long history in Christian Europe and was strong in what in 1871 became Germany. “European antisemitism is a corollary of Christianity. From the earliest days of Christianity’s consolidation of its hold over the Roman Empire, its leaders preached against Jews, employing explicit, powerfully worded, emotionally charged condemnations.”
tThis widespread antisemitism in Germany and, to be fair, almost all European countries in the early 20th century was amplified by the Nazis when they came to power in 1933. The Nazi Party was obsessively antisemitic from its start in 1919, and Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” exhibited hatred of the Jews and a determination to make Germany free of them, one way or another.
tNo evidence has been produced, Goldhagen writes, that any German soldier was killed or sent to a concentration for refusing to execute Jews. He also writes that the claim that German soldiers blindly obeyed orders in general is false. In many cases, German military people of all ranks disobeyed orders they thought illegitimate, and a number of Germans, including top officers of the Wehrmacht, conspired to kill Hitler.
tGoldhagen condemns the failure of Christian churches and their leaders in Germany, with few exceptions, to oppose the Nazis and the murdering of innocent Jews. “The moral bankruptcy of the German churches, Protestant and Catholic alike, regarding Jews was so extensive and abject that it warrants far more attention than can be devoted to it here.”
tMost Protestant and Catholic churches, despite some private dissent of the Nazi’s doctrine about the Jews, were publicly antisemitic, Goldhagen writes.
tHe readily admits that other countries in Europe and elsewhere had populations that were antisemitic. But in Germany it was worse. Antisemitism was not popular in Italy and not originally part of Benito Mussolini’s Fascist government, Goldhagen writes. Even when Mussolini was forced to accede to Germans’ demands against Jews, “Italians, even the Italian military, by and large disobeyed Mussolini’s orders for the deportation of Jews to what they knew would have been death at the Germans’ hands.”
tAntisemitism could be found – and can be found – in many area of the world, including the Middle East and the U.S. But a few nations were worse than others. “The most important national groups who aided the Germans in slaughtering Jews were the Ukrainians, Latvians, and Lithuanians, about whom two things can be said. They came from cultures that were profoundly antisemitic.”
tOne aspect of antisemitism and the resulting obsession with murdering Jews is how illogical and fantastical these beliefs were from start to end. This might seem a mystery except that we must understand that bigotry by its very nature is illogical, a hatred that is a matter of faith not of evidence.
t“All antisemitism is fundamentally ‘abstract,’ in the sense of not being derived from actual qualities of Jews, yet simultaneously is real and concrete in its effects.”
tGoldhagen continues: “Christians’ antisemitism was not based on any familiarity with real Jews. It could not have been. Similarly, most virulent antisemites in German during Weimar and during the Nazi period probably had little or no contact with Jews. Entire areas of Germany were practically without Jews, since Jews formed less than 1 percent of the German population and 70 percent of this small percentage lived in large urban areas.”
tThere were 525,000 Jews living in Germany in January 1933, a small part of the total population of Germany of 67 million. Almost 130,000 emigrated in the next five years. During 1938-39, 118,000 more Jews emigrated. After WWII began, 30,000 more left. The Nazis had forced over half of the Jews of Germany to leave, usually having to forfeit all their property and belongings.
tThe Nazis believed and persuaded many Germans that Jews were a threat to the Fatherland, despite their small numbers and limited political and economic power. The Jews were accused – again, illogically – of being the founders of both capitalism and communism.
tThe ideological obsession of the Nazis to destroy Jews was self-destructive. During World War II, Jews were murdered and mostly not put to work in war plants despite a labor shortage, and the Holocaust effort diverted valuable resources from the war effort. “The destruction of the Jews, once it had become achievable, took priority even over safeguarding Nazism’s very existence.”
tThe Wannsee Conference of Jan. 20, 1942, directed by Reinhard Heydrich, came up with a grandiose master plan for “The Final Solution” against the 11 million Jews in countries from Portugal to the Soviet Union and Ireland to Turkey. Many of the countries were not in German control but presumably, to the conference attendees, would be.
tThe book includes a map of Europe with totals of the number of Jews killed during the Holocaust. Most Jews were not killed in Germany but German-occupied countries. The most Jews killed were in Poland (2.9 million), Soviet Union (1 million), and Hungary (550,000). In Germany, 134,500 Jews were killed. Only 60 Jews were killed in Denmark.
tMere statistics can numb one’s comprehension of this horror and mute empathy for the victims of this genocide or any genocide. Fortunately the author spends many pages detailing individual stories of the perpetrators and victims during the 1930s and 1940s in Germany and German-held territories. These stories are difficult to read.
tSeveral people attacked “Hitler’s Willing Executioners” after its publication as being anti-German. I think the more relevant question is whether Goldhagen’s book is accurate and fair. If the book is indeed (almost or entirely) accurate and fair, then that charge is meaningless.
tThe book was produced from Goldhagen’s doctoral dissertation. He mostly avoids the worst of dense, jargon-filled academic prose, but the book still can be dense in places and at times he uses big words where smaller ones would do. For instance, why did Goldhagen use the word “voluntaristic” repeatedly instead of “voluntary.”
tA more important criticism is great repetition of argument throughout the book, not just once or twice but dozens of times. A statement is made on one page, then again three pages on, then 50 pages later, etc.
tThe 622-page book includes an index and 126 pages of notes, but no bibliography. I would have liked to have seen a bibliography, to be able to compile a list of books I might want to read later on. A lack of bibliography made this task a little more difficult.
tOverall, I thought the book well-researched and illuminating, providing gruesome details of the Nazi evil drive to eliminate Jews and other people. The book is also thought-provoking, lingering in my mind for weeks after I finished it. I hope to read related books in future years to see how Goldhagen’s assertions have stood the test of time.

Since "A Nation on Trial" came out, it's hard to take this book seriously. I included it in my reading list more for the important debates which it inspired than for any quality held within. The "Time on the Cross" of German history.

While interesting from an historiographic point of view, Goldhagen's book is ultimately useless in tacking its own course in Holocaust history.